Buried Dreams by Tim Cahill Page A

was born and almost died. His health problems started at birth. He had never been a strong child, and it wasn’t his fault. Ma said there was a physical explanation for it, just as there was a physical reason for the Old Man’s rages. John had been born with an enlarged bottleneck heart, a serious condition. Baseball, football, any kind of sport at all could kill him just as surely as an argument could pop the Old Man’s tumor.
    “So I was a disappointment to my dad,” John said, “because I was weak and he was strong. He hated the weak person. Even in emotions. We’d go to funerals for someone in the family, and he’d never get tears in his eyes. At a party, he’d never laugh. A strong, somber individual. Emotion was a weakness. Physical illness, even when it couldn’t be helped, was a weakness. I remember once he was so sick he couldn’t get out of bed, and Ma finally called a doctor. The doctor said, ‘How long have you been like this?’
    “My dad said, ‘Ten days.’
    “The doctor said, ‘Why didn’t you wait another day and just call the undertaker?’ And it turned out my dad had pneumonia.”
    By contrast, John was sick as long as he could remember. A heart problem from birth; then, at the age of ten, something seriously wrong with the brain. He began passing out for no reason at all.
    The Old Man tried to connect it to school. Early on, John attended St. Francis Borgia Grade School, and he feels he truly became a Catholic there, at the age of eight. When the family moved to Marmora Street, John transferred to the public school. That school was different, the teachers assholes, and John began getting failing grades. He couldn’t bring himself to attend classes: he’d walk his sister Karen home for the lunch he was supposed to make while Ma and the Old Man were at work.
    Karen and John would take a vote, very democratic, anddecide that the afternoon would be better spent eating puddings and Twinkies that they bought on their lunch money.
    John’s parents were called in for conferences, and Ma thought it might be a health problem. The boy sometimes just fell over, passed out for ten minutes at a time. They took him to the hospital a dozen times, and no one could ever tell them just exactly what the physical problem was. Maybe psychomotor epilepsy. Recurrent syncope. Nothing definite, though, no way to explain the symptoms.
    The Old Man knew, though: the kid was skipping school when he was healthy, so he was probably pretending to pass out so he wouldn’t have to attend classes. Drawing sympathy to himself. Faking.
    “I’d pass out for ten minutes at a time when it started,” John remembered, “then later I’d be out for, oh, half an hour. Even longer. Sometimes they’d find me and no one would know how long I’d been out.” John figured that he spent over a year, all told, in the hospital between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
    “My dad,” John said, “thought it was an attention-getter.”
    If it was an attention-getter, why would you pass out when no one’s there? Richard Dalke, a boyhood friend of John’s, remembers looking for him at school one day. Both boys were fourteen. “I went into the office,” Dalke said, “and I asked one of the secretaries, ‘Where’s John?’ She said, ‘He’s in the next office.’ And I went in there and I didn’t see him. I came back into the office and she said, ‘He just went in there five minutes ago.’ So I went back into the office and there was this big desk and he was on the other side, passed out on the floor.”
    The fire department was called, and John was revived by paramedics, who took him to the hospital. The Old Man stood in the hospital, telling John to his face that he was faking.
    John’s friends—Barry and Ken and John and Richard—never had any doubts about John’s physical problems. “I always thought he was sick,” Richard Dalke recalls. “He had heart problems, and more or less we were around to protect him in